I love money! I love SNG's!

I’m another refugee from the surprisedly closed Finnish community. As you can still probably see, I was a coach before this incident. I’m pretty disappointed cause I just started working on my debut video and now it’s not going to happen. But now there’s nothing left to do but to open a blog on this side too.

A little about me. I’m a 26-year-old uni student from Finland. I’ve played poker from 2010, starting with the free $50 from PokerStrategy. I’ve never made a deposit with my own money, so I’m pretty attached to pokerstrategy community for giving me this chance back then.

My hobbies include gym, guitar, floorball and other sports (recreationally) but I won’t be talking about those here since they are not that special stuff lol.

My main game is and always has been one table SNG’s. All kinds. HU 6max 9max DoN etc. They just fit my style! I also play some tournaments occasionally, personal favourites being omaha and HU.

Anyway, I’ll be posting my progress here from now on (towards whatever) because I feel some sort of social pressure is good for my performance. Lately it has been very poor unfortunately. Even though I think I have OK technical skills (obv since i was hired) and also mental skills on the tables (I rarely tilt and never take shots), my results are mediocre at best. I seem to get discouraged easily and constantly putting in good volume is impossible.

These are my favourite games, regular speed STT’s on party from the beginning of this year. I could be making money with this, if I just had the attitude. But with this volume and variance resistance it’s not going to happen. I just lose motivation to grind when it feels like I have no chance of winning. My poor life management also plays a role in this.

But let's be positive and set our sights forward.

Short-term goals
Learn HU.
Decide where and what games to grind! This is hard since the sites are have changed quite a lot lately.

Long-term random, inspiring goals

These are things that I really want do before quitting poker, if I ever will that is.

[] Play cash games limit where there are no cents on the table (with BRM and beating previous limits). This would probably be NL200 HU.
[] Play on a famous poker tour EPT, WPT, WSOPE etc. I suck at live poker though.
[] Play Sunday million. I haven’t yet lol.
[] Do private coachings. I like teaching/coaching.

Well it's not that simple. There's lots of great english-speaking coaches and many topics have been well covered. And I would need a new contract and everything.

Anyway today I had my tournament night of the month. A bit disappointed finaltable-bubbling a tournament T8 < AJ on T8J at this hour. Final table is always where the money is at.

Also lame cooler on $109 monday night omaha. Huge 90/0 fish limps, I isolate w KK77ss, fish shoves w AAxx and holds. Could do nothing there, and $100 tournaments are a bit too big for my br/skills. But that one was half-paid by strategy anyway.

So. Lost money and time. See you next month, donkaments.

I'll be playing HU and SH SNG's the rest of the month. I'll be aiming for 1000 games, although I probably shouldn't since I need to do lots of studying too.

Great friday night nolife games tonight. I did not see any of the usual good regs. Got something like 11-12 buyins.

Here's a sweet hand against a solid (this far) reg in $22 HU sng. I think I'm defending a bit too wide here though..? Anyway lovely spazz from villain. I had done a few semi std gutshot/bdfd donks earlier with no luck so my image was right to just shove, to keep as much air in my range as possible. And villain tanks and finds the call button. Sometimes everything just works.

Originally posted by NutzAreOk
Have you play any fifty50 games now? How is your mission with them?

Yeah so for everyone i had started a project in the finnish forum called $50--> $500 with fifty50's. I had never played fifties before, and the point was to make my coachings a bit more more versatile and interesting.

Now that coachings are over and I'm only at $3,50 games it's no point really continuing. However I have good graphs and documentation if i someday get the inspiration to mass table at stars again. For now i'll be playing my main games where i have my best $/h.

Crazy day. Made ~$300 playing CASH. EV at $400. Lost a nasty 400bb+ pot set over set.

CASH!!

My cash game history is pretty disastrous. I've lost about $1k to PLO25 and last spring something like $500 in one night to fastforward HU/6max NL50. I haven't really played cash since.

I did beat NL2 to NL25 ages ago on the old Everest site, so I'm not terrible, but I lose focus very easily, and TILT whenever I lose a pot.

However, now my HU skills have gotten better, and also I realized fastforward HU is pretty cool. It doesn't feel as personal as playing one opponent. You can stand up, dump winnings back to account and continue playing 100bb. There's no bumhunting. Villains' skills are mediocre in average. And I can play it on my phone.

But yeah feeling good atm. At one point, after losing AK<KK pfai and JJJ<KKK on dry board at turn I thought this was going to end up badly again.

Heads-up in a speed format sounds interesting - I'd imagine that average bum hunters don't want to play it much, so the player pool would be highly "polarized" so that there are fish and really good regs. Really good regs is of course only a small portion compared to any other player group, so I could imagine that there's a lot of fish in that sea.

Originally posted by HuhtalaJ
Heads-up in a speed format sounds interesting - I'd imagine that average bum hunters don't want to play it much, so the player pool would be highly "polarized" so that there are fish and really good regs. Really good regs is of course only a small portion compared to any other player group, so I could imagine that there's a lot of fish in that sea.

There's usually under 10 players, and I think maybe like 1 or 2 good players. They tend to play more tables though. So yea I think it's good place to be.

This post has been edited 2 time(s), it was last edited by ilari27: 25.11.2013 01:16.

SNG's ave not been good to me lately, but in cash I'm still doing ok. Haven't played too many hands though, maybe I'll reach 10k by the end of the month.

There's some problems that emerge in my cash game. I think leave lot of money on the table on the river. Playing 100bb+ deep is pretty scary for a sng player.
Also it's very hard to decide what kind of value bet should I place when the pot is fairly big and the villain is competitive. Villains hand ranges are also usually polarized in big pots.

1. So I just bet half pot usually and then feel stupid when he's bluffcatching with worse trips.

3. Here's an ok reg (playing 4 tables). He opens like 90% and i hadn't 3bet in a while so here we go. If I was the villain I probably would have checked the river with some sd value. I might even consider calling with a pp because it's very hard for him to have a 7 and Ax don't usually raise this flop. I would probably end up folding that pp though cause I'm a pussy.

Cash games challenge my mental strentgh. Last 10k hands the board runs out so sick every time when I flop a set/overpair. And my cash game is still a work in progress. I'm just starting to realize I should call big river bets only when there's a chance villain is overplaying something, or I have supernuts. It's just never a bluff. In sng's it's so much easier..

What are the formats and sites that you play for SNGs? How many games do you play a month and how many tables do you play? Do you table select at all?

I play all sng formats that are available on $50-$100 levels at partypoker. I don't put in steady volume (i'm not a pro). So it's very hard to tell you how many games i tend to play a month. For example this week I've played 20k+ hands already (in three days!) but before that I had many days without playing at all.

If I grind sng's I usually 10-table at party. Today i had kinda fun playing 4 fastforward tables + 1 HU sng + 2 6max sng's. At stars i played 12-16.

I do table select, very heavily in HU obv, and in 6max I have to sometimes miss a game. If I played at stars I would pay way more attention to that though.

Perhaps you can recommend some road for 6 max cash game using Strategy's videos for somebody like me (STT 6 max regular for past year making steady 2k+ $ a month post rb)

Sorry, I'm still a cash game fish, please don't take any advice from me in that department. I loved some finnish guys' nl videos but that's probably not any help to you.